Mexican Free Radios and the Production of Insurgent Subjectivity

• In Event: Invited Session - Cuerpo, violencia y cultura: actualización de las subjetividades políticas en América Latina I

Abstract

Grassroots media activism has expanded rapidly over the past decade, particularly in the cities of Latin America and throughout the global South, including web-based news forums, computer hack labs, free software projects, digital video collectives, and free or pirate radio stations. In Mexico, free radio activism has become widespread in the context of rural indigenous communities, urban youth and student networks, as well as popular uprisings such as the 1999 strike at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the Zapatista struggle in Chiapas, and the popular rebellion in Oaxaca. Reflecting wider trends in Latin American social movements, Mexico City-based free radio activists have pursued an innovative politics of autonomy based on local self-management and horizontal networking.
Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines the role of Mexican free radios in the production of insurgent political subjectivities among young urban free radio activists in Mexico City. Social movements—particularly those committed to projects of autonomy—entail the construction of collective actors as a necessary pre-condition for and outcome of the creation of new institutions, cultural-political forms, and social imaginaries. The generation of autonomous subjectivities can happen over time through everyday practices of self-organization, critical reflection, and cultural communication or during more dramatic moments of rupture, including the popular mobilizations mentioned above. During such insurrectionary "eventual situations" (Mentinis 2006), free radios become command and control centers, while making new movements visible and ultimately providing ongoing forums for the generation and circulation of autonomous modes of subjectivity, expression, and desire.

Author

• Jeffrey S Juris, Northeastern University